Saturday, March 7, 2009

Weakened Pondering: Blazers production by position

Have you scoped out the NBA Team production by position breakdown over at 82games.com? I could try and explain it myself, but they do a much better job:

With over 4,000 pages of updated content per season, you might have missed the Production by Position numbers we create for both teams and individual players.

On the team side, this data is meant to showcase the kind of performance the team is seeing at each position (PG, SG, SF, PF, C) in a variety of stats -- Points, eFG%, Free Throw Attempts, Shot Selection (Inside Shot%), Rebounds, Assists, Turnovers, Blocks, and Fouls. We also show a variant of John Hollinger's PER, which allows for easy single-number comparisons and analysis of an overall production measure.

Cool indeed. Portland is among only six teams in the entire league that are getting top 5 production from more than one position. Here is the list of those teams, as well as their respective ranks at each spot:

Boston- PG: 2 , SG: 4 , SF: 2 , PF: 6 , C: 20

Cleveland- PG: 22 , SG: 5 , SF: 1 , PF: 3 , C: 9

Denver- PG: 3 , SG: 24 , SF: 5 , PF: 25 , C: 5

Lakers- PG: 24 , SG: 2 , SF: 12 , PF: 10 , C: 2

Philadelphia- PG: 4 , SG: 19 , SF: 3 , PF: 20 , C: 16

Portland- PG: 17 , SG: 3 , SF: 11 , PF: 4 , C: 14

Some quick impressions:

-Nice to see Portland on that list. Fans that say the Blazers have some dire need for more production from the PF position should probably stop talking for a while. (If only.) Anyone else surprised that Portland is so high at the SF position? Outlaw haters, respect the numbers on this one.

-Interesting to see Denver getting so much elite production, especially considering they have yet to get much respect as a legitimate power from the talking head collective of the basketball world.

-Another stat suggesting that Boston is still insanely good.

-Philly! The only .500ish team on the list. It would be interesting to get some thoughts on this from some 76ers fans.

Looking over this list brings the old team-sports cliche you're only as strong as your weakest link to mind. I got curious which of these teams have the best averagerank across all positions. It seems like that could be an interesting indicator of how balanced a team's production is: